At I-COM we speak to a lot of recruitment consultants about the benefits of SEO for their businesses. Because so much of our advice applies across all recruitment niches, I was inspired to put together a list of the main things we do for recruitment agency websites in order to be considered efficiently optimised, and to generate maximum ROI for the client.

1. Indexed Job Pages

Candidates approach recruitment agents for one reason: to find a job. When candidates look for a job online, many of them choose to type the job into Google – ideally, you need your recruitment website to present them with the specific job they have searched for. For this to happen, Google needs to be able to access these job pages and index them, increasing your outreach to candidates.

An example of a properly optimised job page that appears as the first organic result in Google.

2. Job Categories

Having pages that are dedicated to specific industries is good for usability and SEO. It allows users to navigate to their chosen industry and find a hub for jobs of interest to them. It also increases the amount of pages and content on the site on which specific, industry related keywords can be targeted. Sounds complicated, but it is a way to help improve the amount of long-tail keywords your website can be found for.

If you are recruiting in a specific sector, such as legal recruitment, it can also be broken down into different areas such as personal injury, family law, criminal law, etc.

3. Search Engine and User Friendly Navigation

Often people who are searching for jobs are accessing a lot of different pages at once, whilst at the same time searching for information about a specific position or company, so you need to make their experience on your site as intuitive as possible. This can be something as simple as placing internal links in page copy to help navigate between pages, and to help Google access pages. However, if you have a website that is badly built with an unusual or unexpected form of navigation and no way of getting back to the central job hub, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

All websites should have a search engine friendly navigation, but recruitment websites should take special care in building a friendly navigation to maximise the benefit for both search engine and visitor.

4. Accurate Page Titles and Meta Data

The screenshot I showed you earlier has a title tag that contains the job title, location and recruitment agency name. This is key in helping Google understand what the page is about, and helps to make sure the page is indexed and appears for relevant searches. This should be done as standard across every page of the website. Simple.

5. Job List Archive

If you have a job page that has been indexed by Google and the position is filled, what are you going to do with it? This is a common question that is only asked when the situation occurs. If the job is removed from the website this can cause an error page to appear on your site, and if you are constantly filling positions and taking down jobs then you are regularly exposing 404 error pages to Google, and making your website look unstable.

To make sure you don't lose any value from these pages there are a few things you can do. Making an archive of all jobs and highlighting the ones that have been filled is an option. By doing this, you aren't taking away any the value of these pages and you are informing candidates that the position is no longer available. Ideally, these pages should inform the searcher the position has been filled and then present a list of related jobs or the option to browse all the current jobs in the same category as the listing in question.

6. Geo-targeted Pages

If you are operating nationwide then creating geo-targeted pages can help users find jobs in their area, as well as creating landing pages for geo-targeted keywords such as 'SEO jobs Manchester' and 'legal jobs Liverpool'. These pages can then be optimised and links can be sourced to help build their authority in Google’s results.

7. Career Advice Pages

Competition is fierce nowadays and giving your recruitment website the edge is difficult if you are offering the same as your competitors. Easy access to jobs pages is one thing, but being able to provide quality content that gives candidates career advice is another. Useful pages that include 'tips on CV writing', 'interview tips' and 'testimonials from candidates' will help to attract candidates to register their CV and get in touch.

From an SEO point of view it helps to add more pages to the website in order to increase the number of related keywords that the website can be found for.

8. Blog

Get blogging! Blogs show personality and grow the content on a website. These blog posts can be about anything in your industry. A lot of recruitment agencies now blog, see an example on the Sellick recruitment blog which deals with why they blog.

There are plenty more things you can do that I haven't covered here but get these right and you'll be making a good start.